Corporate Social Networking

Julie Meyer has 20 years of investment and advisory experience, helping start-up businesses and industry standards to emerge and become established. She has lived and worked in the UK since July 1998, and worked in Paris, France and Boston, MA, USA before then. She is originally from San Francisco. She is Chief Executive of Ariadne Capital, the investment and advisory firm she founded in August 2000. Ariadne backs entrepreneurs in the Media (music, broadcast, publishing, advertising, gaming), Mobile internet and Communications, and Internet sectors. Ariadne’s strength is in advising on the “Go To Market” strategies of hyper-growth companies.

Julie is well-known for founding First Tuesday, the largest global network of entrepreneurs, which many credit for igniting the Internet generation in Europe. It was sold for $50million in cash in and shares in July 2000. Julie has raised hundreds of millions in capital for start-ups, in addition to overseeing another $150million in seed capital found for start-ups through First Tuesday. From 1998 to 1999, Julie was part of the team at NewMedia Investors, which became early stage
investment firm Spark Ventures in October 1999. She helped several companies, including lastminute.com, WGSN and Arc Cores, to raise significant venture capital financing and internationalise their operations. Each of these businesses has had successful exits for their
investors.

Ariadne Capital is backed by 50 entrepreneurs, who became founding investors with the vision of building the market leading companies of the new millennium. They include the founders of betfair, worldpay, hotmail and SES Astra.

Ariadne Capital was an early advisor to Skype (sold to Ebay) and Espotting (sold to MIVA), two of Europe’s biggest VC-backed successes in the early 21st century. Julie advises leading corporates such as British Telecom, CarPhone Warehouse, EMAP, Morse and Sage, as well as a portfolio of start-ups including Enrich Social Productions, Monitise, SpinVox, SliceThePie, and Zopa. Named a "Global Leader of Tomorrow” by the World Economic Forum and one of the top
30 most powerful women in Europe according to the Wall Street Journal, Julie's mission is to back the best entrepreneurs in Europe with global ambitions. She was named "Entrepreneur of the Year" in October 2000 by Ernst & Young U.K.

Julie writes a weekly column for City A.M. – both print and online editions, London’s business daily
- http://www.cityam.com/ - and also contributes to Business Week, Computing, FT Digital Business,
Spectator Business and other publications. She is a regular industry commentator on the BBC and
CNBC.